It’s a dull cliche in the Arab world now to blame “Zionists” for practically every ill that befalls the world. Recall the very widely-held belief among Arabs after 9/11 that the attacks in New York and the Pentagon were carried out by a Mossad-CIA cabal. Now Mshari Al-Zaydi, opinion page editor of Asharq Alawsat newspaper, relates an interview that took place this week. Excerpt:

Q: Could there be someone else responsible for all this carnage, other than al Qaeda?

A: Who do you have in mind?

Q: Perhaps hidden forces hell bent on destroying our world, instigating conflict between countries and peoples, and inflaming relations between the West and the Muslim World?

A: Your reply poses more questions that it answers. Let us, however, follow your line of argument and accuse the customary enemy: the Zionists. What evidence do you have to prove your claim? Believing in a Zionist conspiracy bestows great powers on this hidden mysterious force. How are we to resist this legendary force that is beyond our capabilities as Arabs and Muslims?

Asharq Alawsat, reports former foreign-service officer John Burgess, is the largest circulating Arabic language daily newspaper in the world. There’s much more in the interview, read the whole thing.

I posted early this morning of the baby steps of religious introspection being taken by Egyptian and other Arab Muslim leaders in the wake of the Sharm el-Sheik bombings.

Meanwhile, back in Pakistan one of the London 7/7 bombers had a funeral.

Shehzad Tanweer, one of four Muslim bombers who self-destructed during the first wave of Tube bombings in London on July 7, had his funeral in his family’s village near Lahore in Pakistan. Though his body was not there, thousands of people attended to pray for his swift passage into paradise, though he is guaranteed paradise as a martyr for the faith, a shahid. The crowd of Pakistanis hailed him as a “a hero of Islam.” The price of his ticket to paradise was the lives of seven infidels killed and ninety wounded by his bomb in the Tube at the Aldgate station.

This scene illustrates a big part of the problem that the Muslim religious elites face if they truly try to steer Islam away from it headlong embrace of jihadism. There are the official doctrinal declarations of Islam, rendered by the clerical elites, and there is the much more pervasive, deeply rooted “folk Islam.” (The same observation, btw, can be made about Christianity.)

So regardless of the proclamations of even fatwas issued by the religious elites, the notion that jihadis are specially favored by Allah will be a long time burying.
________________

Was the American Muslims’ anti-terrorism fatwa bogus?

Counterterrorism Blog reports,

This morning a group of American Islamic leaders held a press conference to announce a fatwa, or Islamic religious ruling, against “terrorism and extremism.” An organization called the Fiqh Council of North America (FCNA) issued the fatwa, and the Council on American - Islamic Relations (CAIR) organized the press conference, stating that several major U.S. Muslim groups endorsed the fatwa.

In fact, the fatwa is bogus. Nowhere does it condemn the Islamic extremism ideology that has spawned Islamic terrorism. It does not renounce nor even acknowledge the existence of an Islamic jihadist culture that has permeated mosques and young Muslims around the world. It does not renounce Jihad let alone admit that it has been used to justify Islamic terrorist acts. It does not condemn by name any Islamic group or leader. In short, it is a fake fatwa designed merely to deceive the American public into believing that these groups are moderate. In fact, officials of both organizations have been directly linked to and associated with Islamic terrorist groups and Islamic extremist organizations. One of them is an unindicted co-conspirator in a current terrorist case; another previous member was a financier to Al-Qaeda.

I spoke with Judea Pearl, father of murdered journalist Daniel Pearl who told me that the fatwa was “vacuous because it does not name the perpetrators of Islamic terrorist theologies and leaders of Islamic movements like Yousef Al Qaradawi, Osama Bin Laden, Ayman Al Zawahari, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, etc.” Pearl told me that these groups are “trying to perpetrate a deception on the American public.”

There’s a lot more onion peeling in the essay.

hat tips: Indepundit

I cited today a piece in Arab News by Arab writer Dr. Mohammed T. Al-Rasheed calling for striking at the breeding grounds of terrorist “vermin.”

In the days since the bombings at Sharm el-Sheik many Egyptians are starting to ask just what exactly the breeding ground is and concluding that it just may be Islam itself. Reports the AP’s Nadia Abou El-magd, “Egyptians debating if their culture encourages terror.” (”Culture” however is being defined in almost exclusively religious terms.)

Stunned by terror attacks at a Red Sea resort, Egyptians are having a remarkably frank debate about whether mosques and schools — and the government itself — should be blamed for promoting Islamic extremism.

Even pro-government media say authorities have created a climate where young people are turning into radicals and suicide bombers.

In a country more used to hearing general condemnations of terrorism, critics on Wednesday were angry — and specific — hammering at instances where they say the government allowed mosque preachers or state media to promote intolerance.

At one mosque in Cairo, some worshippers objected to prayers for the dead and missing after Saturday’s bombings in Sharm el-Sheik because some victims likely were not Muslims, said the editor of the government weekly Al-Musawwar.

As a “professional religous person” I know that religion is not merely believing beliefs, it predominantly what one does because of those beliefs. What is happening in Egypt now, and less overtly among British Muslims earlier this month, is questioning whether Islam itself is leading directly to terrorism committed in its name.

I have in previous writings on One Hand Clapping distinguished between historic Islam and present-day Islamism and its direct offspring, jihadism (here’s my latest rendition). All spring from the same roots, but emphasize radically different beliefs and most importantly, what must be done because of those beliefs.

I observed back in August 2002 that “Islam is what Muslims do - Non-violent Muslims need to wake up; Islam’s soul is being murdered.”

There are definitely enough Jew- and Christian-hating Muslims in the world, especially including in America and Europe, to make me seriously ponder whether the hatred spewed forth by mullahs and Muslim editorialists is in fact the real McCoy of what Muhammed started.

This is exactly what prominent Egyptian voices are saying now. El-magd’s article continues,

“Islamic preaching institutions are in a very acute need for shake-up,” said Abdel Moeti Bayoumi, a theology professor at Al-Azhar University and a member of Al-Azhar’s Center of Islamic Research. Al-Azhar, in Cairo, is one of the leading Sunni Muslim institutions in the world.

Islamic leaders “need to do a lot of work to enlighten clerics and preachers and educate them about the true religious ideas … and teach them about the realities of the age we’re living in,” he said.

Back to my 2002 piece.

If what we are experiencing is not the real Islam, then the rest of the Muslims need to get the Islamic house in order. They need to understand that the present crisis is not just that of Islamists against the West, it is the Islamists against everybody who does not tow their line.

Several months later Professor Bala Ambati wrote,

When moderate Muslims state terrorist attacks are disconnected from Islam, they ignore the reality that Islamic fundamentalist imperialists act in the name of Islam and Muslims, claiming “true Islam’s” mantle from conspicuously absent moderates. . . . Until the realization that theocracies cannot be democracies dawns throughout the Islamic world, saying terrorism is disconnected from Islam is a smokescreen employed to abdicate responsibility to face reality.

We may be seeing mainstream Muslims awakening now.

Sheikh Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah, a Lebanese authority in Shi’a Islam, published a fatwa or religious decree, saying: “We forbid barbaric acts against innocents who have nothing to do with the political demands of terrorists.”

“These are not martyr operations but barbaric suicide attacks and the culprits deserve only God’s punishment,” he said, urging the world’s Muslims to take a united stand against terrorism.

It must be noted that such responses have come in strength only since the al-Sheik bombings, when, as the United Arab Emirates’ Al-Ittihad newspaper noted, (same link),

More than half of the victims were Egyptians, with some Arabs and very few foreigners, so who was specifically targeted and what issues are they (the bombers) defending?

Why haven’t such questions been asked about the enormous number of bombings in Iraq by al Qaeda against Iraqi people? There’s no good answer, but we probably should be happy to take what we can get at this point. Let us unite in congratulating “a council of Muslim scholars in the United States [that] has issued a religious ruling, or fatwa, against terrorism and extremism.”

The Muslim scholars released the ruling during a press conference in Washington, saying that Islam condemns terrorism, religious radicalism and the use of violence.

The scholars serve on the Fiqh Council of North America, an association of Muslim jurists who interpret Islamic law.

The council’s chairman, Muzammil Siddiqi, read the fatwa, which says “targeting civilians’ life and property through suicide bombings or any other method of attack is forbidden, and those who commit these barbaric acts are criminals, not martyrs.”

“All acts of terrorism targeting the civilians are haram, forbidden in Islam. It is haram, forbidden, for a Muslim to cooperate or associate with any individual or group that is involved in any act of terrorism or violence,” he said.

The fatwa also says it is the “civic and religious duty of Muslims to cooperate with law enforcement authorities to protect the lives of civilians.”

The Islamic scholars say the fatwa was prompted by a similar ruling from the Muslim Council of Britain, following the July 7 terrorist attacks in London. …

The Muslim scholars have called for the fatwa to be read during Friday prayers at mosques across the United States.

This American fatwa is stouter than the British Muslims, though, because,

British Muslim leaders, for example, reserved the right to commit suicide bombings to fight an occupying power. That could be construed to give approval to suicide bombers in Iraq or Israel.

The American fatwa makes no such distinction.

There are other voices of prominent Muslims taking a stand. Turki Al-Faisal, newly-named Saudi Arabian ambassador to the United States, wrote that the terrorists,

… claim to be faithful to Islam and faithful to God but they are not. This is not Islam and these acts are absolutely not the will of God. Their twisted vision is alien to the healthy body of the faith that holds the world’s Muslim community together. …

Imams and teachers who have used Islam to bolster and preach their political beliefs have done so by perverting traditional Islamic texts. Declaring fatwas permitting suicide bombings goes against everything at the heart of Islam. These so-called Muslim scholars must be and are condemned. They are violating the most dearly held principles of Islam. …

What, then, must be done? The Islamic world needs to acknowledge the cancer within its own community and to root it out. Muslim scholars must come out loudly and strongly against suicide bombings regardless of where, when and why they have happened. We must undertake a global act of collective self-examination. In Islamic terms this is a project of muhasaba, a quest for the authentic Muslim voice that can dissolve the dark forces of destruction and point toward our true human values that cherish life and can bring about true human flourishing.

(This piece was co-authored with George Carey, former Archbishop of Canterbury.)

I’ll leave the last words to Dr. Ambati, who minces none of them:

Moderate Muslims must choose whether to let megalomaniacs, liars, misogynists and murderers hijack societies and religion and pilot them into destruction’s abyss. Sidelines are not moral high ground. Unequivocally repudiating and forswearing terrorist methods and imperialist aims of Islamic fundamentalism by moderate Muslims is overdue. This requires calling the present jihad by mujahadeen and martyrs awaiting paradise its name, hirabah (unholy war) by mufsidoon (evildoers) bound for jahannam (hell).

Steps are being taken, baby steps for now, but steps nonetheless. We must be watchful and encourage them not to falter.

Comments on.

. . . ” And if you want to catch a terrorist you do not man tube stations. Once you are in the station trying to catch the perpetrator, you have already lost the game. The most effective way to combat vermin is to strike at their breeding grounds and not under your sink.”

So says Dr. Mohammed T. Al-Rasheed. Start here.

Tigerhawk emails a link to his short post indexing three readworthy essays on “binladenism” and what its future holds. I’m grateful he linked to my long PDF opus, “Islamism’s War Against the West,” but I’ve already hawked that here. The other two:

Next, read this review essay from The New York Review of Books, “The Truth About Jihad.” The author (Max Rodenbeck) is the Economist’s Middle East correspondant, and not as reflexively hostile to American foreign policy as the NYROB’s typical contributor. Rodenbeck’s essay is important not because I particularly agree with his prescriptions — I don’t in the least — but because he develops the most interesting and analytical comparison of “Binladenism” (his word) and the radical Left of old. Suffice it to say he sees many similarities.

Finally, but perhaps most importantly, read Kenneth Pollack’s recent testimony (pdf) in front of the Senate’s Committee on Foreign Relations. Pollack is one of very few people writing seriously about Iraq who does not have one of the Four Big Axes to grind (hates/supports Bush, opposes/supports Israel, supports DoD/Supports State-CIA, anti-/pro-American), so you do not immediately find yourself wondering whose ox he is trying to gore. He worked on the Clinton NSC, wrote the book on the necessity of taking out Saddam, and now is a Senior Fellow at Brookings. Pollack argues forcefully that the United States needs to change its approach in Iraq dramatically by adopting tried-and-true counterinsurgency tactics. Pollack’s argument is such a stark challenge to the apparent strategy of the United States that serious supporters of the war as it is currently being conducted need to address his points. Any milbloggers out there who want to give it a shot?

Also, Tigerhawk has some good commentary about whether al Qaeda in Iraq has launched its own equivalent of Germany’s Ardennes Offensive, a desperate effort to regain some momentum after being pounded unmercifully.

Comments on.

Mark Steyn on the life-threatening perils of multiculturalism:

WITH hindsight, the defining encounter of the age was not between Mohammed Atta’s jet and the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, but that between Mohammed Atta and Johnelle Bryant a year earlier.

Bryant is an official with the US Department of Agriculture in Florida, and the late Atta had gone to see her about getting a $US650,000 government loan to convert a plane into the world’s largest crop-duster. A novel idea.

The meeting got off to a rocky start when Atta refused to deal with Bryant because she was but a woman. But, after this unpleasantness had been smoothed out, things went swimmingly. When it was explained to him that, alas, he wouldn’t get the 650 grand in cash that day, Atta threatened to cut Bryant’s throat. He then pointed to a picture behind her desk showing an aerial view of downtown Washington - the White House, the Pentagon et al - and asked: “How would America like it if another country destroyed that city and some of the monuments in it?”

Fortunately, Bryant’s been on the training course and knows an opportunity for multicultural outreach when she sees one. “I felt that he was trying to make the cultural leap from the country that he came from,” she recalled. “I was attempting, in every manner I could, to help him make his relocation into our country as easy for him as I could.”

Steyn recounts the sudden renunciation of multiculturalism by the left since the 7/7 London bombings, but is skeptical it will last. Read the whole thing.

Comments on.

One of the most popular pastimes among the commentati is predicting the political demise of the chief executives of Britain of America. In March 2003, the UK’s Telegraph predicted thus:

If the war is a great victory, if it lasts just a few days, and if it results in a democratic Iraq, Mr Bush will get a chance of being re-elected, Mr Blair will be vindicated, France will be cowed. A new Nato will probably rise from the ashes, centred on the “new” Europe: America, Britain, Spain, eastern Europe. The UN Security Council could lose its role as a body which blesses American interventions. The ability of European states such as Britain and Spain to make their own foreign policy, outside the European Union, will be strengthened.

But the war does not have to be lost to produce quite a different result. If it lasts much longer than it is supposed to do, if it degenerates into civil war, if the fighting in Baghdad is bloody and chaotic and expensive, then the aftermath may look quite different. President Bush may be finished, along with Mr Blair and Nato. France and Germany will once again be the most important countries in the EU. The next US president will think twice before doing anything without UN approval, and the next British prime minister will think twice before involving himself in foreign adventures without the explicit permission of his European colleagues.

But what we have seen is slow progress toward a democratic Iraq, an insurgency growing in power and skill, and a country teetering on the brink of civil war, if not actually already so embroiled. Yet both President Bush and PM Blair are strong in their offices regarding the war. I don’t mean they lack critics and properly so, but the notion that they feel a diminished sense of exercising their nation’s sovereignty is ridiculous. Neither is it even slightly credible that France and Germany are now or are becoming the most important countries in the EU. In fact, Germany is prospectively about to elect a pro-American candidate as chancellor; Germans ranking presently rank Kanzler Gerhard Schroeder as the second-from-the bottom chancellor since WWII; he enjoys a one-percent approval rate.

Also what the Telegraph failed to consider was that things would continue to happen elsewhere in the world, and the UNSC would continue its toothlessness in coping with them. Can we say, “Darfur?” No matter how things turn out in Iraq, the UNSC never gives either the US or the UK any reason to give greater weight to its pontifications. It is as ineffectual as ever, and nothing that happens or doesn’t happen in Iraq will change that.

Ibrahim Amin writes that,

The great detective Hercule Poirot once declared that Shakespeare’s Iago was the greatest of all murderers. Whilst the villain of Othello may not spring to most people’s minds in this context, Poirot’s logic is certainly worth dwelling upon. Any fool can kill with his body – whether by pulling a trigger or thrusting with a knife. Iago, however, had perfected the art of killing with his mind. When he wished to destroy people he did not resort to crude personal violence, as a normal murderer would. Instead he manipulated others, and used them as his weapons. He poisoned their thinking, and nudged them until they would carry out his murders for him – all the while thinking it was in their own best interests, and not realising that Iago was the only one benefiting from their actions. This is why Poirot was so impressed with him. Iago had found a way to kill with impunity, with no risk to himself… .

Who are today’s Iagos?

The ones who fall into this category are the mullahs and imams, religious and community leaders who constantly poison the minds of their pupils, constituents, or congregations. Instead of advocating violence and the killing of infidels, which would move them into the second category and render them vulnerable, they take the Iago approach. They rant and rave about the Jews, or the Americans, and their supposed evils. They rage about injustices – either real or imagined – against Muslims, and do their best to turn those who listen to them against the western world, often against the very countries in which they live. They take the Iago approach, which potentially makes them just as dangerous as Bin Laden. Whilst a terrorist leader can direct dozens of people to commit acts of evil, a cleric can instil in hundreds or even thousands the mindset which will lead them to commit acts of evil. They are more subtle, but that does not make the threat they present any less serious. They kill with their minds, moulding murderers who will kill for them (or the causes they believe in) without being directly asked. Thus their own hands remain clean, and they think themselves safe.

His solution? Read his essay and see.

Osama Saeed, a spokesman for the Muslim Association of Britain, asks in The Guardian just what all the calls for Muslim self-examination are about:

The position of Muslim organisations and mosques has been consistent for years. Killing civilians is murder, and a crime in Islam. We have consistently said that Muslims must help the police to track down those responsible.

This is why I’ve found it strange that many Muslim leaders have offered to look deep within our community now.

Maybe it’s because they better than he understand that there is a deep rot within much of modern Muslim rhetoric and practice that is both destructive and self-destructive. Many western Muslims have awakened to that fact, exemplified by among other things, the Iqra Learning Center bookstore in Leeds

Some of the 7/7 bombers hung out at the bookstore. …

Iqra not only sold hatemongering Islamist literature, but, according to The Wall Street Journal, was “the sole distributor of Islamgames, a U.S.-based company that makes video games. The video games feature apocalyptic battles between defenders of Islam and opponents. One game, Ummah Defense I, has the world ‘finally united under the Banner of Islam’ in 2114, until a revolt by disbelievers. The player’s goal is to seek out and destroy the disbelievers.”

Or consider the words of Ahmed Rashid, writing of London’s July 7 bombers,

Britain has allowed militant Muslim preachers freedom to preach their message of hate in the mosques, the meeting halls and the sitting rooms of British Muslims. Literature and videos promoting extremism have been allowed to spread deep into the Muslim community. While some outsiders saw this as typical British eccentricity or liberalism, foreign intelligence agencies have been furious with British laxity for some years.

The four July 7 bombers did not have to enrol in a Pakistani religious school or madrassa to learn about Islamic extremism, because it was available in Yorkshire. Experts now think it unlikely that the three London bombers who came to Pakistan last year enrolled in a madrassa to become ideologised. Instead, they arrived fully brainwashed and probably used their time making contact with al-Qa’eda and Pakistani militant groups to train in explosives.

Then there is Khalid Kelly, British resident and follower of radical cleric Abu Osama, who said,

“Some of the people tell you Islam is a religion of peace because they think that then you’ll want to convert. But you cannot possibly say Islam is a religion of peace; jihad is not an internal struggle.

“We can fight wherever, in Iraq, London, Paris, or Berlin. There is no such thing as innocents. The idea of the Islamic state is terror against anyone who doesn’t support Islamic ideology.”

There are many other Muslims who have been vocally critical of the growing tilt of mainstream Islam toward violence. Thomas Friedman quoted Husain Haqqani, author of the new book Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military,

Every week some courageous Arab or Muslim intellectual, cleric or columnist publishes an essay in his or her media calling on fellow Muslims to deal with the cancer in their midst. The truth tellers’ words also need to be disseminated globally. “The rulers in these countries have no interest in amplifying the voices of moderates because the moderates often disagree with the rulers as much as they disagree with the extremists,” said Husain Haqqani, author of the new book “Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military.” “You have to deal us moderates into the game by helping to amplify our voices and exposing the extremists and their amen corner.”

Other Muslims speaking against this trend include:

— Muslim activist Irshad Manji:

Iqbal Sacranie, secretary-general for the Muslim Council of Britain, is an example [of Muslim denial about Ismalmist terrorism]. In the midst of a debate with me, he listed potential incentives to bomb, including “alienation” and “segregation.” But Islam? God forbid that the possibility even be entertained.

That is the dangerous denial from which mainstream Muslims need to emerge. While our spokesmen assure us that Islam is an innocent bystander in today’s terrorism, those who commit terrorist acts often tell us otherwise [italics added- DS].

- Pakistani Muslim Nasra Hassan’s delineation of the Islam-based (if not actually true Islam) motivations of more than 200 suicide-bombers in training or some who were apprehended or even survived:

[An imam] explained that the first drop of blood shed by a martyr during jihad washes away his sins instantaneously. On the Day of Judgment, he will face no reckoning. On the Day of Resurrection, he can intercede for 70 of his nearest and dearest to enter Heaven; and he will have at his disposal 72 houris, the beautiful virgins of Paradise. The imam took pains to explain that the promised bliss is not sensual.

- A Muslim who in October 2001 wrote that Islam had become its own worst enemy:

The struggle against violence in the Muslim world is much more than a struggle against murdering fanatics like the Taliban. Or despotic leaders like Saddam Hussein and Mahathir Muhammad. It is also a struggle against the Islamic movements whose simplistic and virulent rhetoric often ends up sanctifying the fanatics and demonises everything else in the absolutist, unquestioning terms of all totalitarian perspectives.

- Or a self-described “unhappy American Muslim” who says that

. . . one of the biggest problems in the Muslim world [is] the total inability to deal with any kind of criticism of Islam or its practices, no matter how kindly or sincerely it was intended. The legitimacy of any criticism is denied; either the criticizer, Muslim or non-Muslim, is part of the plot to destroy Islam, and/or working for Satan, the “Jewish/Zionist conspiracy,” or whatever nefarious organization dedicated to destroying Islam, and/or condemned as heretical/apostate. Whatever is said is “lies” and “slander” and “hate” regardless of its veracity.

Mr. Saeed is not even familiar with the voices of his own fellow Muslims, including British Muslims. Nonetheless, he plunges ahead:

Mr Blair has attacked the idea of the caliphate - the equivalent of criticising the Pope. He has also remained silent in the face of a rightwing smear campaign against such eminent scholars as Sheikh al-Qaradawi - a man who has worked hard to reconcile Islam with modern democracy.

Seriatim:

(1) The caliph of Islam’s classical age was a political ruler of an empire, the caliphate, that was gained almost exclusively by the sword. Within 81 years after the death of Mohammed, Islam came to dominate land masses from the Arabian Peninsula to the Atlantic Ocean. Muslim armies stormed into Europe from the east and the southwest. Spain fell under Arab domination in 713 and was not fully freed until 1492. In 732, an Arab army under Abd er Rahman marched toward Paris; it was defeated near Tours by Charles Martel.

The Muslim Ottoman Turks penetrated into eastern Europe as far north as Poland, and into Russia all the way to St. Petersburg, where there is still today a large, active mosque. Arab naval raiders reached England, the western coast of Europe and even Iceland. The West was almost constantly on the defensive; the cultural and religious survival of Europe was a close-run thing.

One of al Qaeda’s stated goals is to restore all the lands of the old caliphate to Islamic rule. For Mr. Saeed, living in Britain, to fail to understand why this idea is abhorrent to Europeans betrays severe historical un-awareness. Does he not realize how offensive the whole idea of the caliphate is to everything Britain holds dear? Saeed’s claim that opposing the restoration by force of a ancient military empire is equivalent to criticizing the pope is simply absurd and would be laughable if the subject weren’t so serious. We’re back to the unhappy American Muslim’s observation that for so many Muslims, Islam itself is sacrosanct and completely off limits to criticism. Finally, let’s face it, criticizing the pope itself is no offensive idea to millions of Westerners, it’s done all the time. Why, Mr. Saeed, should the caliphate be off limits?

(2) Sheik al-Qaradawi does indeed have a reputation - among Muslims - as a moderate, mostly because he insists on being described that way. He was once a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Egyptian, original Islamist movement of the 20th century and the prototype for almost every Arab terrorist organization since; it is Hamas’ direct sire, for example. And even the BBC reported al-Qaradawi defends suicide bombings against Israel.

Defending suicide bombings that target Israeli civilians Sheikh A-Qaradawi told the BBC programme Newsnight that “an Israeli woman is not like women in our societies, because she is a soldier.

“I consider this type of martyrdom operation as an evidence of God’s justice.

“Allah Almighty is just; through his infinite wisdom he has given the weak a weapon the strong do not have and and that is their ability to turn their bodies into bombs as Palestinians do”.

Mr. Saeed, we do not accept the claim that al-Qaradawi is “moderate.” No longer will we parse one kind of Muslim terrorism from another. By his own words, Sheik al-Qaradawi is seen for what he is: an advocate of terrorism committed by Muslims against non-Muslims. This is your idea of “moderation?” And you fail to understand why he has been criticized? Mr. Saeed, you are showing yourself to be an unserious man.

But Mr. Saeed’s piece de la resistance is his closer about the bombings in London:

You can regard these acts as part of Islam, or as an irrational reaction to injustice taking place in the world. If it’s the former you have to explain why this started only 12 years ago and not 1,400.

Again, historical ignorance on Mr. Saeed’s part. “This” didn’t start 12 years ago, it did indeed start 1,400 years ago. The Islamic caliphate and the West have been in intermittent combat or open warfare since not long after Mohammed’s death. Only beginning in 1688, with the defeat of an invading Muslim army near Vienna, has there been anything approximating political peace. It lasted only a little more than 100 years, after which French and British armies invaded the Middle East in open imperialism (as well as power struggles between them).

Neither did “this” start only 12 years ago even in the sense Saeed means. Jihadism, an outgrowth of Islamism, has its roots in the 1980s, when Saudi clerics declared a general jihad against Soviet forces that had invaded Afghanistan.

Prof. Olivier Roy, author of Globalized Islam, wrote,

[T]he first generation of Al Qaeda left the Middle East to fight the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the 1980’s. Except for the smallish Egyptian faction led by Ayman al-Zawahiri, now Mr. bin Laden’s chief deputy, these militants were not involved in Middle Eastern politics. Abdullah Azzam, Mr. bin Laden’s mentor, gave up supporting the Palestinian Liberation Organization long before his death in 1989 because he felt that to fight for a localized political cause was to forsake the real jihad, which he felt should be international and religious in character.

From the beginning, Al Qaeda’s fighters were global jihadists, and their favored battlegrounds have been outside the Middle East: Afghanistan, Bosnia, Chechnya and Kashmir. For them, every conflict is simply a part of the Western encroachment on the Muslim ummah, the worldwide community of believers.

Second, if the conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq and Palestine are at the core of the radicalization, why are there virtually no Afghans, Iraqis or Palestinians among the terrorists? Rather, the bombers are mostly from the Arabian Peninsula, North Africa, Egypt and Pakistan - or they are Western-born converts to Islam.

If Mr. Saeed continues to insist that Islamist terrorism is an “irrational reaction to injustice taking place in the world,” then he’d best also admit that the injustice is taking place in Arab lands and acknowledge that terrorism, according to a Harvard University study, “is more more accurately viewed as a response” to the terrorists’ own “political conditions and longstanding feelings of indignity and frustration that have little to do with economic circumstances. We suspect that is why international terrorist acts are more likely to be committed by people who grew up under repressive political regimes.”

Perhaps now, Mr. Saeed, you understand why your own leaders have offered to look deep within your community as a seedbed of Islamist killers. Perhaps you should, too.

Based on the math of this information, I will immediately enter into negotiations for the sale of One Hand Clapping at a beginning bid of $1,950,000.

Glenn Reynolds calculated that his site, by this standard, is worth about $145 million. But his readers spend an average of only five seconds per visit. My average 60,000 different readers per month spend 105 seconds per visit.

So if I normed the reading time per visitor to Instapundit, I have an Instapundit-equivalent readership (which I hereby term “IER”) of 1,260,000 per month. That is, the time my site is being viewed in a month is the same as the viewing time of 1.26 million of Instapundit’s readers.

By such norming, One Hand Clapping is worth not a mere $1.966 million but a whopping bargain-priced $41,302,800, but heck, I’ll call it an even $41,300,000.

So make an offer!

Sad samples of crassness or worse, directed at our military:

One:

The family of a Marine who was killed in Iraq is furious with [Pennsylvania] Lt. Gov. Catherine Baker Knoll for showing up uninvited at his funeral this week, handing out her business card and then saying “our government” is against the war.

Two:

Not even 24-hours after Private First Class Tim Hines’s wife and family said goodbye at his funeral, American flags that had adorned their Fairfield yard were piled beneath a car and burned.

Hines’ sister-in-law woke up to hear her car alarm around 5:30 a.m. and saw her car on fire.

As firefighters brought the fire under control they discovered a pile of around 20 American flags underneath the car.